Tabletop role-playing game

I've been building a data-rich, apples-to-apples comparison chart for tabletop RPG systems. For each system, it shows:

• The most well-known setting/spinoff/franchise

• The largest associated subreddit and its size

• Distinguishing characteristics of the system

• Its most popular setting

• How crunchy it is

• The core task resolution mechanic

• Price of entry for the essential PDFs

• Whether it has open-licensed rules (with a link to the SRD if available)

• IP owner

• Basic timeline of its history and development

I'm doing this because I have a general interest in different TTRPG systems but often have trouble remembering what's what.

A couple major ones are probably missing - so far I've just got the 22 RPGs I see mentioned most often here on Reddit.

Check it out at , and if one of your favorites is missing (or misrepresented in some way), join me over on and let's get that fixed.

Cheers!

I'm not very knowledgeable on this, but I'd suppose some contenders may be:

Runequest - Influenced the Elder Scrolls, which is now itself an extremely influential videogame series.

Traveller - Inspired Firefly and Serenity.

Sword World - May have been very influential to the JRPG videogame genre, though I understand that western CRPGs were also a big inspiration for early JRPGs.

World of Darkness - Masquerade brought lots of people into LARPing and was a jumping off point for them to design and run their own parlour larps.

Hey,

I've written a TTRPG design blog exploring the design, as well. There's an obvious personal angle to this one, but there's plenty of design thoughts too.

You can read it here -

In brief I feel translating the souls experience to the tabletop is a 'cursed design problem' in that there's many elements of the souls experience that contradict one another when you put them into tabletop form. You can have a more narrative focussed game but lose the element of skill and mastery, you can have a tactical game but become bogged down in combat and lose out on exploration, you can have a lighter 'OSR' approach but lose out on the combat elements and find there's issues when it comes to advancement.

I dig into that and more (it's a long blog), as well asking ourselves why we try to design projects that often feel insurmountable.

Would be great to hear your thoughts on the topic.

What tv shows make you go "Woah, this is just like X?" when you watch it? It could also be just some parts of a tv show (the X segments in Y are like Z game) or even just a single episode.

It'd also be neat to see what tv shows have games based on them, so would be interested in those, too!

And obviously some games use certain shows as clear touchstones - also fine!

Quoted from the :

Over the course of the last week, more than 1,500 tabletop RPG publishers, from household names going back to the dawn of the hobby to single proprietors just starting out with their first digital release, have joined together to pledge their support for the development of a universal system-neutral open license that provides a legal “safe harbor” for sharing rules mechanics and encourages innovation and collaboration in the tabletop gaming space.

The alliance is gathered. Work has begun.

It would take too long to list all the companies behind the ORC license effort, but we thought you might be interested to see a few of the organizations already pledged toward this common goal. We are honored to be allied with them, as well as with the equally important participating publishers too numerous to list here. Each is crucial to the effort’s success. The list below is but a representative sample of participating publishers from a huge variety of market segments with a huge variety of perspectives. But we all agree on one thing.

We are all in this together.

• Alchemy RPG

• Arcane Minis

• Atlas Games

• Autarch

• Azora Law

• Black Book Editions

• Bombshell Miniatures

• BRW Games

• Chaosium

• Cze & Peku

• Demiplane

• DMDave

• The DM Lair

• Elderbrain

• EN Publishing

• Epic Miniatures

• Evil Genius Games

• Expeditious Retreat Press

• Fantasy Grounds

• Fat Dragon Games

• Forgotten Adventures

• Foundry VTT

• Free RPG Day

• Frog God Games

• Gale Force 9

• Game On Tabletop

• Giochi Uniti

• Goodman Games

• Green Ronin

• The Griffon’s Saddlebag

• Iron GM Games

• Know Direction

• Kobold Press

• Lazy Wolf Studios

• Legendary Games

• Lone Wolf Development

• Loot Tavern

• Louis Porter Jr. Designs

• Mad Cartographer

• Minotaur Games

• Mongoose Publishing

• MonkeyDM

• Monte Cook Games

• MT Black

• Necromancer Games

• Nord Games

• Open Gaming, Inc.

• Paizo Inc.

• Paradigm Concepts

• Pelgrane Press

• Pinnacle Entertainment Group

• Raging Swan Press

• Rogue Games

• Rogue Genius Games

• Roll 20

• Roll for Combat

• Sly Flourish

• Tom Cartos

• Troll Lord Games

• Ulisses Spiele

You will be hearing a lot more from us in the days to come.

Author's Word: Unfortunately many of the tweets involved are no longer accessible because, between yesterday and today, . It's apparently , linked to some involving Koebel, but... yeah, what a timing, eh?

All of the tweets that were lost to time have been replaced with archived versions that, while not perfect, should hopefully be enough to give you an accurate idea for the sake of the story.

Prologue: Of Dungeons and Dramas.

Gather round, boys and girls and those who fit either both or neither categories, and let me tell you a story. It is a story of a rise and fall, of anger, of disappointment, and of much Twitter angst. It is the tale of one of the swiftest and most thorough career deaths in the history of tabletop gaming. It is the tale of .

As a content warning, if you're not comfortable with descriptions of (fictional, nonhuman) sexual assault, this is not the story for you. As an author warning, I will tell you right now that I'll be doing my best to focus on the facts, but there is only so much one can do. I will not pretend to actually be an impartial observer. Feel free to seek out other versions of events after reading this if you want.

So, some background. I assume most people here are familiar with at least the basic idea of tabletop RPGs, but if you aren't, here's the summary: Tabletop RPGs are basically make-believe with rules. People sit around a table, create a character, and then go on merry adventures. Making said world is the task of arguably the most important player, the Game Master (Dungeon Master for D&D). He makes the world, controls the people the players interact with, basically everything that isn't controlled by the other players. People play RPGs to have a good time with their friends, but unfortunately sometimes things don't work out that way.

Chapter the First: The rise of Sir Adam of Koebel.

Now, with that basic context, let us introduce the protagonist of our sad tale. At this point, I need to put a disclaimer: I didn't particularly follow Adam Koebel before the actual events of our story, barring watching a few streams he was a part of, and this section will remain short and sort of vague because they're essentially what I pieced together from what I knew of him, and what I found online.

Mr. Koebel first came to public attention with the release of Dungeon World in 2012, a narrative "rules-light" system he co-created based on Apocalypse World, and hit the ground running from there. The system was a hit, and he managed to successfully leverage the exposure it gave him to establish himself solidly in the RPG online community: he started running live games on Twitch in 2014 for itmeJP, a relatively famous RPG YouTuber, and in 2015 became the "DM in Residence" at Roll20, the biggest online "virtual tabletop" service. Adam Koebel was ascendant.

This level of success came from several things. First, of course, was the street cred that being the co-author of Dungeon World gave him, but that was only the first step. From there, he built up his name as the representative of the growing "socially conscious" side of RPGs. He was the very public spearhead against the white and male domination in RPGs, and actively promoted player agency at the table, better inclusivity of racial/sexual/other minorities, consent tools, and RPGs as a "safe space". Remember this, this becomes incredibly important later.

EDIT: Chapter the First.Fifth: Cloak and Daggers.

So, since posting this thread, a member of the community came forward and made me aware of something I didn't know about Adam's rise to power. It's not strictly related to the actual drama, but it did add a layer on top since it all came to light after the relevant events, so I'm adding it in.

Some context: Before there was one GM on itmeJP's Rollplay, there were three. These were Steven Lumpkin, Neal Erickson, and of course, Adam Koebel.

At the time, the channel was still small, and verbal agreements between the GMs and the channel were what held them together. As the channel grew into one of the biggest RPG-related franchises on the net, however, JP decided that it was time to replace these with formal contracts, which the GMs decided were wildly unfair, and banded together to negotiate better contracts as a group. They chose Adam as their representative in negotiations with JP.

The result of this negotiation meeting was Steven and Neal being cut out of any Rollplay work and Adam becoming Rollplay's "Sole GM", Steven and Neal's series were cancelled and they were shown the door. This was a massive shock at the time to fans and the full details didn't emerge for years (basically until Rollplay got cancelled, but that comes later in our story), with both Neal and Steven stepping away on the face of it, willingly because they had "other commitments".

From then on, Rollplay was the Adam show. He ran every series and was the sole IP creator working with Rollplay.

Here are some sources about the whole thing, a full account from and .

Chapter the Second: Non-Consensual Robo-Orgasms.

As of early 2020, Adam Koebel was at the pinnacle of his prestige. His persona had been firmly cemented, he had a large following of very dedicated fans who subscribed to his ideas regarding inclusivity and consent in RPGs, and he was in a bunch of stuff online, including more livestreamed games. Nothing could have gone wrong for him.

. (This clip is not for the faint of heart. Even if a description of a sexual assault doesn't bother you, the sheer mortifying train wreck in progress likely will.)

So, for those who didn't watch, what went wrong? Basically, Adam Koebel was GMing a game on Twitch with some hundreds of viewers when one of the characters, a robotic bartender named Johnny played by Elspeth Eastman (a woman, this is relevant), went to see a "friend" for repairs and upgrades.

To cut a long story short, the character of the mechanic, controlled by Koebel, violated Johnny by forcing an "orgasm" upon him without permission.

If you look at the players during the clip, you can see the horror and unease dawning on their faces as the situation unfolds, even as Adam keeps giggling his way through the description of a non-consensual sexual assault on one of the characters. Though I couldn't find an archive of the live chat, it was in a very similar state to the players: bafflement, unease, disgust. By the end of the scene, poor Johnny never gets a chance to prevent or fight back against the sexual assault, since he has no idea what's going to happen until it happens, and the session ends right afterwards. During the post-session discussion, a laughing Koebel responds to Johnny's horrified player that "robots need love too".

To fully grasp the magnitude of what has just happened, let's review a few things. Adam Koebel, the well-known face of "consent promotion" and safe spaces in Tabletop RPGs, as a male GM, plays out what is clearly a pre-planned scene of nonconsensual sexual assault on one of the female players' characters (a player who is, by the way, a survivor of sexual assault) in front of a live audience of hundreds. No agency is given to the player, at no point before or during the scene does Koebel make sure his players, especially the character's player, are fine with this, and on top of that he appears intensely amused by the sexual assault he is orchestrating in his game, even gloating about it afterwards.

Nothing good could come out of this.

Chapter the Third: Things go poorly.

Within a week, the show was put on in an official video on March 31st. On the segment, Koebel blamed a poor implementation of consent tools such as the X-Card (when something you're not comfortable with is going on, you make or say a pre-defined gesture or phrase, or even raise a physical object, and the scene immediately ends and is glossed over) which he himself had actively and vocally championed in the past, and stated that they should have been better discussed and implemented as a group.

This evasive and blame-shifting explanation did not sit so well with Elspeth Eastman, the player in question, who released on the matter, stating she was quitting the show, and expressing her dissatisfaction with his apology, both in private to her and in public. To quote her words:

If you need to have a talk with your cast beforehand that you’re planning on introducing a sexual predator NPC to one of their characters I guarantee you not one person would be OK with that. Especially not in front of hundreds of people. This isn’t a question about what could have prevented it when Adam’s literally the one in charge.

In response, Adam released an on Twitter the next day. Bear in mind that at this point, it's been over 10 days since the actual incident, and those 10 days have been filled with constant backlash against him, especially after the video he made on the cancellation of Far Verona. At this point the apology is coming very late, only coming out at all because of the backlash, some might say. And it's... still kind of lackluster. While he does take responsibility and apologize, he doesn't ever actually address the fact that he thought it would be okay to run a sexual assault scene, bar an evasive half-sentence, instead saying that he made a "mistake" and blaming his own "internalized issues".

It is worth noting that throughout this whole mess, his core fanbase has never ceased supporting him. Some see in this fact the proof that what he did wasn't so bad after all, while others interpret it as Koebel cultivating a fanbase where he can do no wrong, and where his celebrity acts as a "get out of jail free" card. I will let you make up your own minds.

Chapter the Fourth: The cancellation of Good Sir Koebel.

At this point, Koebel disappears from the Internet for two months. Until May 31st, there is no word from him anywhere, until a in response to BLM and the George Floyd killing. However, some, like , creator of Monsters of Murka, accused him of attempting to "taking advantage of a situation [...] as a means of squeaking his face back onto people’s timelines in a positive light."

Koebel disappears again for a week, and then he publishes an article called "" on his personal blog, headlined by a picture of him looking sorrowfully away from the camera. It's the longest thing he's said to date on the topic, barring the non-apology video, so it's his opportunity to once and for all lay to rest the story by properly, unambiguously, and fully apologizing for his behavior.

(note: this one hasn't actually been deleted, but seeing as he deleted his entire Twitter account within a remarkably short span of my publishing this writeup, I'm not taking any chances.)

Instead he spends three long paragraphs explaining that it was scary and difficult to be a celebrity online before finally stating that he made "a mistake". He spends a single paragraph on the "mistake", remaining vague, never spelling out what the "mistake" actually was, and attributed it to the "unrehearsed and spontaneous" nature of Twitch. He closes out the only section about his "mistake" saying that "in roleplaying, players work together to create an improvised narrative". In general this came across as just more evasive blame-shifting than actually owning up to what he did, especially in light of what follows in the next seven long paragraphs of the blog.

However, he follows that up by essentially playing the victim, saying that because of the "angry voices online" he got deplatformed for his "mistake". Because of this "hateful reaction" he could no longer "take creative risks", and he now feels unsafe. To cut the rest of his statement short, he basically said he was excited to move on to other things, saying that he now feels liberated from life online, and that he's happy there are people who like what he makes. He closed out this whole thing saying that he felt "loss, grief, and sadness". Not for what he did, but for what it cost him.

So, what now? Since this statement, he's published exactly three tweets. The first was promotion of his new blog post on GMing. The responses were split between , and others who for going against his own stated intent of "stepping back from the hobby" and from online presence a mere three weeks after releasing "Moving on". The second was a from a Dune RPG, along with the removal of all his work from it. And finally, a , with replies turned off.

EDIT: Chapter the Fourth.Fifth: The Bard chooses the right time to post

So... this might go against rule 13 as it literally just happened yesterday/today, but I will add it in as an "appendix" to the whole sordid story rather than its focus. If one of the mod disagrees with this assessment, I will immediately remove it. [Others in the comments] () have already , but your humble bard will attempt once more to give you a distilled and shortened version of events.

Let's talk a bit more about that "one sentence post telling his fans to buy a product" I mentioned at the end of Chapter the Fourth. The product in question was "The Perfect RPG", an ongoing Kickstarter that got cancelled at 11,398$ out of its 6,200$ goal. Why did it get cancelled, you may ask? Well, here's where things get interesting.

The project was a collaborative one, with a long list of contributors that . However, they included (the other co-writer of Dungeon World) and many more. Many of them backed out of the project. Why? Because Adam Koebel was in it and they had no idea.

This is where things get a bit weird. Koebel's name wasn't on the (Which, you may note, has a list of contributors in alphabetical order at the back, sans Adam Koebel). But then the actual list on the campaign page (the same has since been removed) had the contributors presented in reverse alphabetical order by given name, which had the consequence of putting .

So basically Adam Koebel catfished his way into a project with other big names in the industry. As people were quietly (or not) pulling out of the project due to Koebel's involvement in it, the creator, Luke Crane, scrapped the fully funded kickstarter campaign rather than remove the problematic element from the list. Some in the Kickstarter backer comments that the whole project was probably intended as some weird "gotcha!" statement about cancel culture, which would fit with Adam's relative silence on the matter, his game named after his apology to the livstream sexual assault saga, and the project tagline of "The quest for perfection".

Whatever it may have been, it failed to let Koebel worm his way back into the RPG scene, and as a result he deleted his Twitter account, which was the source of much confusion and consternation for your poor bard when he found out.

To close out this section, I will simply quote one of the commenters in the thread: "I guess [this] answers the question of 'has Adam Koebel gotten better about getting consent'"

Epilogue: Good Night Sweet Prince.

And that's just about the last to be written about the sad tale of Good Sir Koebel, who once was the icon of social awareness in the RPG community, and who will now never work in it again without a pseudonym for failing to follow his own teachings.

I tried to give as thorough a timeline of events as I could, but there are plenty of things I just couldn't fit, such as accounts by of his about what being in a relationship with the man was like, the common point between the two being accusations of gaslighting and of generally not respecting their boundaries. I might also have missed something due to simply not having been able to find everything online. This is, to my knowledge, the first post that really tries to piece the drama from start to finish for those who didn't follow it.

Above all, however, your humble bard confesses to being unable to remain entirely impartial to the story he has told you. While the event itself was... very disturbing to watch, and says some pretty poor things about the character of the person who allowed it to happen, a swift and thorough apology would have been enough in my eyes.

Instead, as is probably apparent, I find it immensely sleazy that Koebel never properly addressed the fact that he ran a non-consensual sexual assault scene (which he immediately afterwards gloated about to his mortified players), and instead tried to subvert his own apology down the line by playing victim, minimizing the harm he caused by playing it off as a mere "mistake", and to the bitter end trying to shift blame away from himself. To me his whole response felt like a (failed) attempt at remaining in the limelight, rather than one to step away from it as he claimed.

It also paints a fairly negative light over all the things he defended online. Can he really have believed what he was saying about consent and inclusivity when he himself flagrantly disregard consent, and made a female survivor of sexual assault relive a similar scene at his table, giggling all the while? Can we really take his messages of responsibility and awareness as honest when he has shown such a clear lack of either in his own case? These are open questions to you, my dear audience. My answer is already found.

Today, Koebel remains relatively low profile. His RPG comeback having been met with backlash, he now focuses (with a changed username), where he regularly posts his artistic photos to the admiring comments of his fans. His reads like the memorial to a fallen hero, and his finals tweets had a massive skew in favor of those saying they missed him and that Adam did nothing wrong. Perhaps this is merely the slumber of the beast, who will one day, when the community has finally "moved on", attempt his triumphant return, much like Napoleon returning from exile on the Isle of Elba.

Your humble bard merely hopes that such a return meets the same fate for the Fallen Paladin of Social Justice.

Okay maybe a bit of a weird request, definitely outside the norm for this sub. But I figured this sub is likely to have more specialized knowledge for the question as opposed to just by virtue of cultivation's popularity here and relative nicheness otherwise.

If you were going to run/play a TTRPG campaign based on cultivation stories, what game system would you want to use and why? Is there one that you think emulates the genre beats very well, or was made specifically for that purpose? Shout it out!

This is partly to sate my own curiosity and partly because I think it could be a fun discussion in the comments, so I'll see you there!

Me and my friends have been wanting to play the Magnus ttrpg but we missed the crowd funding. Looking online now we can’t find the physical book or pdf available anywhere. Does anyone know how to get it without going back 2 years to participate in the funding?

Background: the Cyberpunk series of Tabletop RPGs were created by Mike Pondsmith and published by his company, R Talsorian Games (Henceforth RTG). As the name suggests, it is a Cyberpunk genre game, drawing heavy influences from the works of William Gibson and other contemporary authors, and is set in its own fictional universe. The game has been through four editions so far, Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk 3.0 (also known as Cyberpunk 203x) and Cyberpunk RED. (Cybergeneration never existed. There is nothing to see here. Move along, citizen)

Today’s story will focus on one of these editions, but does have some spillover that is needed to set everything up. Its the story of a writer making all the wrong decisions for all the wrong reasons and pushing forward with their creative vision despite all advice to the contrary. And it’s about how those decisions would wind up bringing down a long-running and once-popular RPG line.

The second, and usually considered definitive edition of the game, Cyberpunk 2020 was released in 1989 just at the peak of the Cyberpunk genre as it was entering the mainstream consciousness. The game was generally well-received and developed a strong following who enjoyed it as a game and as a setting.

However, that was not to say that the game wasn’t without it’s faults, some of which I need to address for the sake of this story. At it’s core, the game used RTG’s Interlock system, which was hypothetically a simple one. The core mechanic consisted of Attribute + Skill value + 1d10 roll versus a target number between 10 and 25 depending on the difficulty.

The main problem lay in in the attributes. The game had nine attributes, all valued between 2 and 10 and all equally weighted. However, all combat was based around the Reflexes attribute, while two to four of the others were basically redundant depending on the character’s role. This made it stupidly easy to Min-Max a character out the gate; you could effortlessly create a character who’s Attribute + Skill was 20 or higher at character creation, thus making most skill checks trivial.

(One nickname for the game was Grenadepunk 2020 for one approach to combat that resulted from this flaw. Simply put, characters could hide behind dumpsters and lob grenades at unseen enemies with pinpoint precision because it was literally impossible for them to miss the target number)

Likewise, the game had a number of other problems with its rules. Many were poorly thought-out, incomplete, hidden in strange sections of the book, or lost in special-case scenarios. This also included some sections that had been bulk copy-pasted from the prior Cyberpunk 2013 edition, regardless of how much the rules had changed between editions. The hacking (“Netrunning”) rules were especially egregious; they basically amounted to a bookkeeping heavy solo dungeon crawl minigame that the GM put the hacker character through while the rest of the players went off to get pizza.

Despite these limitations, Cyberpunk 2020 would be successful and remained in publication for a number of years. Like other RPGs, it developed a cavalcade of sourcebooks, rules expansions, adventure modules and other materials. And, since it was the nineties, it also had an ongoing metaplot that slowly moved the setting along.

The latter would reach its peak in the Fourth Corporate War series that was released in 1997. This was a series of adventures that were intended to ‘wrap up’ the setting in advance of a new edition. However, despite their importance to the setting, the series was not well received. They basically amounted to a series of lengthy, high-lethality dungeon crawls that the player characters have to slog through while actually accomplishing nothing. Instead, all the important stuff amounts to the player characters standing around while Mike Pondsmith’s important NPCs talk at each other. And then it ends with the aforesaid NPCs detonating a nuclear bomb in the middle of a major city and unleashing a computer virus to destroy the entire internet, with both of these actions being presented as unquestionably heroic actions.

At about that time, Mike Pondsmith left RTG to go and work for Microsoft. He did, however, retain control of the company, a fact that will become important later. The remaining R. Talsorian writers would begin work in a new edition of the game. Very little details of this edition would ever be made public, but it was intended to use RTG’s then-new Fuzion system. Being honest, I’m hesitant to call this an improvement. Fuzion and all that surrounded it was such a mess that it would warrant its own Hobbydrama post.

However, while he was at Microsoft, Mike Pondsmith had been working on his own new edition, provisionally titled Cyberpunk 3.0. In 2004 he returned to RTG and used his authority as owner of the company to cancel development of the in-house RTG version in favour of his own version. Internally, RTGs writers had a lot of concerns over 3.0 in terms of its setting and content. Pondsmith’s response was to fire anyone who disagreed with him allegedly without paying them for their work, and go ahead with 3.0 anyway.

For the next year, previews of 3.0 would trickle out of RTG. Early reactions to them were mixed, to say the least. Many had reservations about the changes to the setting and world. However, there were also a lot who had faith in Mike Pondsmith and felt that he would come through in the end. And then the new edition was finally released in 2005. And it turned out that those concerns were more than justified.

Saying that 3.0 was bad would be an understatement. It was one of those products that managed to be bad on just about every level.

First of all, it was now using the Fuzion system, which as mentioned above was not a popular choice while not actually fixing any of the game's balance issues. As if that wasn’t enough, large sections of the rules had been copy-pasted from 2020 with little regard to the changes to the ruleset. The result was that the rules would contradict themselves in places, or make references to the wrong page, or reference things that weren’t in the book at all. Some sections were even duplicated. Simply creating a character meant constantly thumbing back and forwards across the entire book and trying to hunt down various references.

Visually the book was ugly as all get-out. The whole thing had a black, white and green pallet that was clearly intended to invoke an old-time monochrome CRT monitor. Instead it managed to make the book look bad and made the text hard to read in places. This was only enhanced by a terrible layout that made finding the rules or sections that a reader was after actively difficult.

And then there was the art, the most mimetic part of the whole game (and the reason for the post title). Because Mike Pondsmith had been working on his own and essentially couldn’t afford an artist, the book was instead illustrated with . Crudely customised, awkwardly posed and dressed up with faux-futuristic weapons and outfits, but still clearly and unquestionably action figures. And as if to add insult to injury, they were treated to an ugly green filter that only seemed to make the pictures even less attractive while blending into the ugly green morass that was the rest of the book.

So the rules were bad, and the layout was bad and the art ad quickly become a joke. But was the setting itself any good? Well, no. In fact, long-time fans of the setting almost universally hated it. Pondsmith had decided to replace the Gibson Cyberpunk Noir (with a side of Anime Catgirls) of the old setting with some sort of post-apocalyptic-transhumanist mashup that actively undercut some of the key premises of the setting.

Rather than the gritty edge of replacing flesh with cybernetics in order to maintain their edge, characters now used zero-consequence nanotech systems. Others could get systems that could effortlessly heal even the most grievous injuries with no side effects. Some were capable of freely swapping between multiple bodies. And so on. Furthermore the efforts to make the setting post-apocalyptic was undercut by the existence of infinitely replicating nanomachines that could essentially make anything for anyone, effectively eliminating any sort of resource scarcity

Furthermore, the game introduced a new element known as altcults. Similar in many ways to Vampire the Masquerade’s Clans, each one was a themed group that player characters would belong to. However, these were across the board poorly developed and lacked any depth beyond a single note and many of them were, simply put, ridiculous. The best example was the group that lived in a thinly-veiled version of Disneyland and used it’s technology to build giant robots. I am not making this up. Oh, and there was also an Edgerunner altcult who’s special thing was being combat monsters in a setting that was already about being min-maxed combat monsters.

The Altcults would in many ways become the least liked part of the new setting. Besides the fact that they felt like a needless addition to the game and many of them were simply one trick ideas with no real depth, there were other issues with their implementation. Not only were they poorly balanced, but the flavour text made it clear that these groups were supposed to be opposed to each other. This raised issues of how a group of player characters from different altcults wear meant to cooperate, ones that the game never addressed.

And as if all of this wasn’t bad enough, the physical editions of the rulebook had bad bindings which meant that they would quickly fall apart. It was as if every part of the book was determined to be bad.

As can be imagined, the reaction to 3.0 was universally negative. , making it one of those rare cases where there was nothing positive to say about it. Longtime fans hated the changes to the setting. Newcomers found it to be confusing and inaccessible. Trying to use the book to run the game proved to be an exercise in frustration as people hunted and pecked their way through the morass of ugly green text. The fact that fans of the game had waited seven years and through at least one false start for this didn’t help any.

RTG had planned a series of sourcebooks and rules expansions for the new edition. Poor sales of the core book meant that only two of them were ever completed and released. The line died quickly, but along the way managed to trash both Pondsmith's reputation and the entire RTG Cyberpunk property.

I’d like to say that was the end of the story, but of course it wasn’t. Despite his failures, Mike Pondsmith would eventually be given a huge pile of money by a computer games company to use his IP as the basis for a , with an attached tie-in Tabetop RPG. He’d also use his fame to launch a that would be well-funded, but never delivered any product and held of on issuing refunds for five years.

Position Filled! I looked through as many people's portfolios as I could, apologizes if I didn't get back to you.

Hello

I'm looking for an artist for a tabletop RPG I'm designing. It's a low fantasy investigation-intrigue game with a big focus on the character's emotions and drives. I'm looking for a moodier style - that can get into the abstract when necessary. There is a tiny bit of sci-fi too - the setting has that whole advanced lost age thing going on, and the current tech is more industrial revolution. Think the video games Disco Elysium + Dark Souls for the vibe.

I have a budget of $1000 dollars, and am hoping for one large multi-subject piece and two smaller single subject pieces - or three if my budget can stretch to that. As a tabletop RPG, this is going to be 2D character and concept art meant sized to print. The art would be used commercially. Deadline is flexible, I'd prefer it within two months. I'm just exiting the design stage of this game - it hasn't been marketed yet and this art would be used for some of the promotional material. With luck, there would be more work in the future, but I can't promise that.

I'm still deciding exact content I want for each piece. I know one will be more expressive-abstract - representing a character's "emotional archetype" that fills the role of character class in this game. I will have at least one character piece - showcasing a profession or skill that you can do in the game. I'll be able to more concrete details shortly.

Let me know if this project interests you, I'd love to see all of ya'lls portfolios. Thank you for your time.

I am NOT OP. Original post by in .

I have permission from the OP to post this.

Here's another paragraph to block spoiler tags for mobile. Hello.

trigger warnings: Retaliatory accusations of domestic abuse at one point

- Jan 20, 2023

I'm not against a 5 minute lore dump to get some context. But this is fucking exhausting.

The Skype call started more than 90 minutes ago. He told us the entirety of his homebrew world creation myth, the factions that fought in ancient wars, where every deity and race comes from, everything.

I like worldbuilding myself, I run a game with a homebrew world. But I would never lore dump like this. This is ridiculous. This is making me want to call the game off. He's not a stranger, i would have left 10 minutes in. But he's a friend's husband, and I'm sure if I say something I'm starting shit in our group.

He's now going over every homebrew race and subrace, their abilities, their skills, their traits, their culture and how they get along with another races.

90 fucking minutes. I could've watched a movie in the meantime.

Edit: it's from his fucking novel. Now it makes sense. I'm not gonna play with this guy.

Edit 2: two hours. It's been 2 hours total. I still have no idea how the game is actually played, and I'm not gonna remember that many god named Wathr'anjak, who has a brother named Rofah'stagnor and a second cousin once removed named Yurtragn'ghafnog. Just 2 useless hours. At least it's over now.

- Feb 27, 2023

You're in for a treat. I bring you both an update to my previous post here (DM has been lore dumping us for 90 minutes straight. He's still going), and a new, fresh story including that guy, his wife and how they've made me think that inviting a couple of methheads would have been better than inviting these two players.

People involved:

• Me

• The lore dump guy, who I will call Turdkien

• Turdkien's wife, CCL, or Crazy Cat Lady

• My GF

• My friend and our 5E DM, John

• Another friend, Jane

The update: I talked to Turdkien, and told him that what he'd done (lore dumping for 2 hours in the most dry, uninspired and boring way imaginable) was unacceptable, disrespectful of my time and completely unnecessary. He doubled down. After a brief discussion, I ended up telling him that I disagreed with whatever the fuck that introduction to his system was and that it had completely killed any interested I had in playing his game. We left it at that.

The new story: our group had planned a weekend at my house where we would watch the extended versions of LotR and I would run our first ever game of Pathfinder 2E. We were all excited.

Turdkien insisted on running his shitty homebrew system we still knew nothing about. John, who had suffered the lore dump with me, was hesitant. I told Turdkien that if the group was okay with playing his system, I would spend the day studying while they played. My GF said no. Bless her. Turdkien dropped it as the only one excited to play his game was CCL.

I help everyone make their sheets. CCL half-asses it and ignores me for two weeks while I ask her to fix the things she picked wrong (spells and equipment). Turdkien makes a "ruffian rogue", his own words.

The day before the game, on friday, I pick John and Jane up, and Turdkien and CCL go silent all day until my GF asks them if they are okay. The leave their house 6 hours after they said they would. They arrive at my place, and since CCL is pregnant, I let them sleep at the main bedroom, mine. John sleeps at the second bedroom, Jane sleeps on the couch and my GF and I sleep at my mother's house, who lives a few minutes away. That is to say, I'm treating them well, IMO.

The next day, the game starts. Throughout the game, Turdkien's character is uncooperative, selfish and endangering the rest of the party. He's close to being thrown in prison for disrespecting a member of the town's council and admitting, in front of her, that he broke into the house of another NPC,. He completely ignores his backstory and the hook I gave him to tie it to the adventure path's story (Age of Ashes). Essentially, he's playing like a clown. Both my GF and John say that they didn't really get what the hell Turdkien was aiming for and they found his presence at the table disruptive to the game.

At one point, Turdkien's character actually got both Jane's and CCL's characters drunk and attempted to get them naked in the middle of a tavern. That was my first hard "NO", and the mood of the table changed completely. John suggested he tried to do something more innocuous, like painting mustaches on their faces or whatever, but it was creepy and Jane was visibly uncomfortable.

They left the next day, and I gotta say, they are the worst fucking guests I've ever met. Now, I don't want to bore you with paragraph after paragraph of narration, so here's a list of every shitty thing they did while staying at my house:

• My GF has celiac's disease. CCL made the honest mistake of using a knife to spread butter on her bread and stick that knife in my GF's butter, which we keep separate to avoid contamination. The not so honest mistake was touching EVERY OTHER CLEAN PLATE I HAD IN MY CUPBOARDS after touching her bread, and leaving every surface covered in bread crumbs.

• While John, Jane, my GF and I were cooking and putting dishes in the diswasher all weekend, Turdkien didn't lift a finger. All he did was eat and drink. He downed two entire bottles of whiskey by himself in two and a half days, by the way. At least he bought them, as none of us drink.

• Turdkien has drank around six 2 liter bottles of coke throughout the weekend, which he proceeded to just leave wherever he happened to be at the time. Behind an armchair, at my porch, next to the fucking trash can but apparently not inside for some reason, under the table, wherever.

• Turdkien brought whiskey with him to my bedroom and drunk an indeterminate amount of it there.

• Speaking of my bedroom, they fucked on my bed. I know because both John and Jane heard them. They told my GF as she was dropping them at their places. In fact, CCL told my GF, in the morning after, to "change the bedsheets, tee-hee".

• Turdkien has loudly peed with the door opened in the bathroom right next to my living room, where the rest of us were trying to enjoy a meal.

• CCL interrupted me while I was GMing to explain some shit about her work to Jane. My attempts to resume the game proved unsuccessful. Table talk is inevitable, and I don't mind it, but this went on for thirty minutes and, since Jane was sitting across the table from CCL, none of us could hear each other over her conversation.

• CCL had the fucking audacity to shush John and me the following day, as we where laughing, to explain some shit about her pregnancy.

• CCL has taken a BB gun I had in some drawer and handled it in a very unsafe way, pointing it at both Jane and Turdkien's faces.

• Turdkien and CCL have made everyone uncomfortable more than once by excessive and inappropriate PDA. Not a peck, which I would consider normal and healthy, but some groping and explicit sexual talk. Considering they fucked on my bed, it's not surprising. My GF actually told me that they've done this several times already, when we were playing at John's place and she accompanied them to get food while I went with John and Jane.

• When they were leaving, CCL took advantage of my unwillingness to kick a pregnant woman to keep my porch door open for 10 minutes, dropping the temperature of my entire living room (it's winter and pretty cold here), to lure a stray cat into my house, despite me telling her that I know that cat and it neither wants to be inside or wants me or anyone else touching it. This is after me telling her four or five times to close the fucking door and leave the fucking cat alone.

I do not know how people over thirty are able to be this absolutely stupid, disrespectful towards their host and the other guests, intrusive, careless, dirty and overall assholes.

I know that many of the horror stories here would be prevented or fixed by a simple conversation, and even though I was not interested in staying friends with them, I wrote CCL a few hours ago that their attitudes were completely disrespectful, shameless and disgusting. They both denied it, even though John avoids conflict at all costs and would set himself on fire rather than talk shit about someone if it isn't a big deal. Turdkien and CCL started calling me, so I blocked them both after kicking them from my group.

TLDR: I invite assholes into my house and they fucked on my bed.

Edited to add that he tried to get two female PCs naked in the middle of a tavern and some formatting.

- Mar 6, 2023

It's me. Again. Sadly.

Last time I updated you all on Turdkien (or Turducken, as some of you read) doubling down on his two hour lore dump, and talked about and his wife's absolute disrespect and shamelessness when they stayed at my house.

As I said then, I texted CCL and told her that their behavior was unacceptable, and kicked them out of my group. Both Turdkien and CCL went into panic mode, called me, called John, called Jane, texted me a bunch of times, and I ended up blocking them.

I didn't tell John to kick them out of his game. I made it clear that I wouldn't be joining if they were, but I'm not telling someone how to run their games, and I'm not big on stirring shit up in groups. I think it's best if everyone comes to their own conclusions.

After 4 days of blissfully ignoring Turdkien and CCL, my GF got a text. It was CCL. She asked how my GF was. And then did something I didn't even imagine her doing, even coming from someone who has sex on someone else's bed.

She told my GF "I hope that CaptainChuckie is not taking it out on you". Implying that I would redirect my anger (although at this point I wasn't angry, I was content with never knowing from them again) towards my GF, mistreat her or abuse her in any way.

This was the final nail in the coffin. I unblocked CCL and demanded her to explain exactly what she meant, and she lied about coming to an arrangement with my GF where she (my GF) would intercede with me on behalf of CCL.

I told CCL that she has reached a new low, to delete my number and never contact me again, and never even ask about me or anything related to me again to anyone.

Then I talked to John. I'm not one for talking shit behind someone's back, but if CCL was implying to my GF that I could be abusing her, I couldn't even imagine the kind of shit she was lying about to everyone else. I showed him screenshots of CCL's texts to my GF and my own conversation with CCL, and told him about CCL telling my GF that he and I had somehow made a plan to make fun of Turdkien and accuse him of having sex at my house because we hadn't liked his lore dump.

John got pretty angry too, and deleted his own group where he planned his games. He agrees with me that accusing someone of abuse over being told to not fuck at someone else's house is completely unacceptable, and told me that he doesn't plan on staying in contact with CCL or Turdkien.

I really hope this is the last time I have to update on this whole debacle. CCL and Turdkien are blocked on every conceivable way they have of contacting me aside from postal service, and I'll be a happy man if I can live my life without ever seeing or hearing about them.

TLDR: woman who had sex on my bed implies I could be abusing my GF out or spite.

Follow-up comment when I asked to post this and hoped he hadn't had contact with either of them still:

Yeah, go ahead.

It's been almost two weeks of peace, aside from CCL passive-aggressively sharing an Instagram post with my GF about being excluded and ostracized from groups, but I told her about the someone posted and she agrees. I logged into Instagram for the first time in more than a year and a half just to block CCL, juuust in case.

Want to play as a centaur, minotaur, human, or other Centaurworld species in a TTRPG adventure that takes place in Centaurworld? 👀

for the Centaurworld Art Club server's TTRPG (tabletop-style roleplaying game) adventures!

Some more info:

• The server is active every day! In addition to the TTRPG, come join us for Centaurworld fanart, other artwork, server games and streams, or just to hangout 😊

• We're using a quick 1-session format for now, but we would love any feedback from interested players on if we should host longer game sessions, or even make new adventures based on other roleplaying systems

• If you don't have a character ready, no worries! We have several ready-made "rental characters" to choose from + more new characters coming soon!

Hey! I've been working for the past couple months on a Shining Force-inspired tabletop RPG system, and last night was the first playtest!

While the system isn't yet available to the public, I thought the idea might appeal to some other Shining Force fans who overlap with TTRPG interest and might be interested in seeing such a system.

You can watch our session from last night here:

It's still being worked on and refined, but I'm quite happy with this first test, and looking forward both to continuing this campaign and eventually making this into something available for others to bring to their own tables.